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Talk:Lisa Mishima/@comment-30835929-20161224100152
Heh, I once posted this very long comment in the most useless place possible: YouTube. But re-watching the anime I thought I might repost it here because it's actually relevant and people actually come to this wiki because they care about the characters. SO. This is just my two cents. I felt like Lisa was intended to be a foil to the other characters. In anime and video games (and even things outside those genres) there is a tendency to bombard us with these teenage characters who can do extraordinary things and we easily accept them as believable because that is what we're accustomed to. We are perfectly willing to go "yes, this 13-19 year old person just saved the world with or without supernatural abilities or advanced tech". Lisa was entirely average as your run-of-the-mill high school student goes and more than a little cringeworthy because yes, in a lot of cases she is or appears to be helpless or clumsy or generally detrimental to the situation. But if you think about it in terms of other completely average people, how many would know what to do in the situations Lisa finds herself in? We expect ''a certain level of competence because we see it come so easily to Nine and Twelve but that's the whole point. We need to remember that they AREN'T the norm and we need to see that from the beginning before we know WHY they are as they are. We know they're smart, but as I said -- we've all been essentially programmed at this point to accept that in stride. That that is 100% normal within the unwritten laws of anime and most media, really. I didn't feel like Lisa was placed there as an Everyman sort of self-insert character or purely for love interest purposes but rather something so incredibly ''opposite ''from what we get from Nine, Twelve, and Five that they really stand out. She's not a weak character and she's not underdeveloped. She's got a quiet, shy sort of personality. She's been bullied and abused. We don't know anything about her but we know she's deeply troubled. I don't think she suffered at all from a lack of development. We see development but the point was never for her to grow and become as great as Nine and Twelve. The point was for her to be her. And despite the danger and the fear and the awkwardness she actually manages to be happy in that short time with them. Not all that much time is elapsing here between when she meets the boys and when it's all over. Think about your own life. How much do you change and grow in a short amount of time? Even in a state of duress you really don't. Not all at once and not without a clear direction. After awhile everything was consumed by what the boys were doing and she was just trying to keep up or keep out of the way. I never saw her as a love interest regardless of how her and Twelve got on. I felt like her purpose within the plot was to give the boys someone they eventually grew to know cared about them and expected nothing in return, which was something they never had. She was also someone they knew would never forget them, in addition to the detective. To them, that would have value. Twelve took an interest in her because he could see that she was suffering and that the look in her eyes reminded him of the other children like them, not because he was interested in any other way. Despite having a mother and a life outside an institution he could tell that something had happened to her to make her feel like they had. Her mother never saw her for her. Whatever made her mother be the way she was made her respond to her daughter such that Lisa might as well have just been a nameless presence. No one could see her except for when they were mistreating her. She probably got sick of her food and flushed it because eating was just another thing to do, like Twelve said of the compound food. By the end Lisa seems quite different just from the experience of knowing them. I felt like Lisa's greatest purpose in their short time together was giving them something real and human that may not have been perfect and might have caused them a lot more grief and trouble than they'd ever planned on dealing with, but was something they had lacked in their entire lives and truly ''needed. It's also an interesting counterpoint when we're talking about what makes someone "strong" or "valuable" as the entire purpose of the project that spawned Nine, Twelve, and Five in the first place was intended to create what a group of individuals deemed "stronger" or "better" human beings. And while that might have been true in terms of their skills ''it sends a message that there is something less valuable about those that lack those particular abilities or never grow to develop anything like them over a period of time. It's a nod towards the way most societies judge people's worth and raises the question to the viewer "what exactly do those two see in her?", which in turn allows for a more thorough understanding of the themes in play. I also do not think she was written as she was because of how female characters can often be portrayed in anime. We don't see this in Five and we don't see this in Shibazaki's daughter, even though we only see the latter very briefly, but it is enough to know that there is an awareness present that there aren't just "damsels" out there. I also feel like the boys were Lisa's "von". She was hiding in bathrooms before and seemed to have no direction at all. She seemed to wander as much as she could and behaved like she was content just to disappear. She might have run away from her mother or worse. Lisa, on her own, was likely headed for a bad end if she hadn't crossed paths with the boys. By the end, despite everything, she seemed brighter and happier. She seemed to have something to keep going for. Perhaps in those moments where she wondered if Nine might destroy everything she considered that they all could have died then, if he had decided to simply detonate the bomb in a building somewhere. She walked away with a greater appreciation for being alive as well as with the knowledge that she would go on remembering them. I think, to her, this was a good enough incentive to keep trying. And this is true for real people all the time. Many people are inspired to live better lives after the loss of others. It isn't so much living ''for them as much as the idea of living the life they didn't get to live and in that way honouring and remembering them and keeping their spirit alive in that way. I felt like Lisa would take something like that away from the experience. So I definitely don't feel like she was lacking any sort of development at all. I felt like she was highly realistic and I appreciated a portrayal of someone like that. If she'd done a complete 180 it would have felt very forced whereas the rest of the series grounded itself very well in a sense of looking in at a story set in a world just like the real world.